


Fato Profugus

by glittersnipe



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: F/M, M/M, and joyce, author got a bit too into ondaatje, cobb dealing with grief via alcoholism, who wouldn't do eames tho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-20
Updated: 2013-05-20
Packaged: 2017-12-12 10:01:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/810306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glittersnipe/pseuds/glittersnipe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He keeps the maze Ariadne drew,  crumpled tight in his coat pocket. Round and round. He can't believe he was ever naive enough to think the past was ever truly past. He can't believe he might be naive enough to think this girl might yet hold the thread.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fato Profugus

_**Title:** Fato Profugus_

  
“A love story is not about those who lose their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing – not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.”

\-- Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient  
 __

__

 

_Paris, November 2008_

__  
“History, said Stephen, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

\-- James Joyce, Ulysses

 

He checks the address written on the paper in his hand, hoping that he’s got the right one. Snowflakes flutter and fall like dying butterflies all around him, glittering in the streetlights, and the bare trees clutch for each other like dying lovers. It’s probably about four in the morning; every time he checks his watch he immediately forgets. He’s on a street off the Boulevard Saint Marcel, in the thirteenth arrondissement, last known address. It’s freezing cold, and his breath steams around him all golden in the glowy electric light, like an angel’s halo.

He leans his forehead against the doorway and tries not to think. He stays like that for a long time, pressed up against the cold slab, like a body laid out, trying not to think. Finally, when he thinks he can move without crumbling, he presses the buzzer next to the appropriate surname.

He’s pressing for ten minutes before anybody answers, and then, crackly with static, he gets a sharp “Qui es?”

“Arthur?”

“…Yes?”

“It’s Cobb. Let me in.”

“Fifth floor.”

Arthur’s standing at the door when the lift arrives, wearing jeans and a loose, ratty tshirt. His hair is standing on end, and though he looks drawn and tired, his eyes are alert. “What the hell is going on, Cobb? It’s five in the morning.”

Cobb stares at him, and the thought, from nowhere, comes into his head: this is where it all changes. With the rush to the airport, the panic of getting past security, slammed taxi doors, every gaze suspicious, everyone a threat – it’s all been a numb blur of motion. The present, frozen in the rush of movement, the last memories of her not yet become memories. A discarded gown, strewn on the bed, post in her name on the sideboard, and the house still smelled the same, the kids still looked the same asleep in their beds.

This is the sharp, sudden fall. This weight is the weight of history. The point of no return. Once he says this, it can’t be taken back.

“Mal’s dead,” he says. Arthur’s face goes white.

“What?”

“She’s dead. She died yesterday. They want me for her murder and I didn’t know where else to go,” Cobb says, his voice cracking, and then he’s holding back tears and he says, “I thought I was dreaming, and this couldn’t be happening, it can’t, and oh God, Arthur, she’s dead, Jesus, Jesus.”

Arthur walks with him wordlessly into the kitchen, sitting with him in the harsh bright light as he spins her totem over and over, each time willing it not to fall.

Each time it goes down, she goes down with it, and when he closes his eyes he sees the awful dark stain far down below, the crumpled shape, and then he’s doubled over the table sobbing like he can never stop, sitting in a kitchen far away from a home that is now utterly, utterly destroyed. He hears a rasp as Arthur pulls his chair over, and then he’s crying into Arthur’s shoulder, his fists pulling at Arthur’s tshirt. Arthur’s hands rest just above his shoulderblades, and he stays there, silent and still, as Cobb cries and cries until he’s sure he can feel the empty broken pieces of his heart dissolve, and his mind plays over and over that one awful last memory of her, and oh God now his beautiful wife’s a memory –

– and it’s so, so easy to just try and believe that she’s still here, that this is not his story or his past, because he can’t just think of her gone like this, he can’t begin to imagine it even, just her sheer not-presence, and then he sees the broken twisted hieroglyphic of her body far, far below and he thinks of lying with her hand in his, waiting for the train to come, waiting to die, to live again –

This is the weight of history. The stuttering repetition of thought: she’s gone, she’s gone, she’s gone. Her final act. She can no longer do anything else.

He doesn’t know how long he stays there, his face pressed into the clean, blinding white of Arthur’s shoulder, pressed against the sopping wet of his own tears, but when he looks up the sky looks bruised rather than black, and he feels empty and white inside. His head hurts, and it’s all just aching numbness and the weight is still there. He wonders dully how he ever breathed so easily before, when now every inhale is an incalculable effort. He is so, so tired.

He leans back into his own chair, suddenly ashamed.

Arthur gets up, still quiet, and makes them coffee, pouring a generous splash of whiskey into each mug. It steams softly on the table, and when Arthur sits back down, Cobb notices that his eyes are red around their edges, his nostrils pink and inflamed, though he hadn’t moved at all.

“What happened,” Arthur says, finally, staring into his mug, taking a hearty pull from it.

“She committed suicide,” Cobb says. The words have an artificial ring to them, an air of theatricality he hates. “She – she jumped.”

Arthur finishes his coffee, goes up, and gets the bottle of whiskey. He pours it neat into his mug and sets the bottle down in from of them with a heavy thud, and drinks silently, his throat working, grimacing when he’s finished.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Cobb says, wildly. “She’s dead, Arthur.” How can they be sitting here drinking whiskey in the kitchen without her?

Where is she, right now?

“Why do they want you for her murder?” Arthur says flatly.

“What?”

Arthur closes his eyes, takes a breath, and says, “Why are they saying you murdered her, Dom?”

“Do you think I killed her?” Cobb snarls.

Arthur looks at the table. “Answer my question,” he says.

“You fucking asshole. You fucking, fucking asshole, how fucking dare you, you absolute fucking cunt, what do you think? Do you think I killed her? How could you think that?” He grabs Arthur’s collar, still wet. Rage flares up from somewhere unknown; he hadn’t thought he was capable of anything beneath the icy overwhelming sorrow rising in his throat, but now he could kill Arthur. His hands shake. Their noses are nearly pressed together, and Arthur looks so damn composed, but his hands are shaking and balling into fists, pressed into his thighs.

“Do you?” Cobb repeats, and Arthur is suddenly standing, pulling out of Cobb’s grip, his mug fallen and shattered in a loud crack of bone china on the floor below.

“I don’t fucking know!” he shouts. “Jesus, Cobb, I know you, I know how much you love her, but – Jesus –” he presses a shaking hand to his forehead, “But you show up at five a.m. here, in Paris, and she’s dead and you’re telling me they’re saying you’ve killed her, and you can’t – I can’t – I know…” he stops, and his hand falls to his side, clutching the table’s edge, still shaking.

Cobb stands, and they’re facing each other with the dawn begin to filter coldly through the windows, through the blind white of the snow-clouded sky, and he suddenly just can’t even be angry any more, can’t be anything, and he says, “Arthur. I love her. I love her more than anything. I didn’t kill her.”

Arthur looks at him, tense, his face drawn and his mouth a narrow knife’s slit in his face, and then something drops in his expression and he says, “I believe you.”

“I just… I can’t, I can’t tell you, I can’t think about it, okay? I just, she jumped. She jumped and I had to just leave her there.”

He betrayed her. His beautiful wife. He thinks of her all lit up in the morning sun, groggy between the sheets, the wave of her hair, the exact smell of the nape of her neck. She is so, so strong, and so alive, and how can it be that she’s not about to walk through the door, tease Arthur about his obsessive cleaning, tell Cobb he can’t make coffee worth a damn and kiss him in that soft, languid way? That she’ll never do that again? That she is consigned to the past tense, the past historic, beating her fists against the unbreakable wall of memory? He sits down heavily and takes her top out of her pocket, sends it spinning, watching as it falls from the table and comes to rest amongst the shattered remains of Arthur’s coffee mug and the golden pool of wasted whiskey.

He sags back against his chair, exhausted, and Arthur says “Maybe you should go to sleep.”

Just like it’s any other night. How can it be like this, so – so ordinary? How does the clock’s hand continue its endless, pointless revolutions? Wordlessly he follows Arthur into the spare bedroom, lying on his side while Arthur closes the curtains, brings him spare clothes, does all the little things the healthy do. He’s got his face pressed into the side of his arm, watching the bright line of morning razored through the slit of the curtains, and he can feel Arthur standing in the doorway, but he doesn’t turn around.

The room is cold and empty. He lies there, and hears Arthur finally say, “I’m sorry, Cobb,” and shut the door. His bare feet don’t make any sound as he walks down the hall, and then Cobb is alone in a bed that isn’t his.

It’s still snowing outside. The flakes fall bright and noiseless, whirling to the ground below and melting, leaving no trace of their brief lives.

He wakes up when Arthur sets a cup of coffee down on the bedside table. There is a brief respite, a beautiful blankness as he stares around the unfamiliar room, the curtains still closed, high ceilings and pale furniture, and then all of a sudden it all comes back. The weak sutures are torn all over again, and he feels his heart’s ripped pieces begin to bleed. He feels the weight settle in with the soft danger of a predator.

“It’s nearly six o’ clock,” Arthur says. “If you want to go back to sleep, I have some pills somewhere.”

“Yeah,” Cobb says. His voice razors the raw tissues of his throat. It doesn’t sound like him. “Please.” He stays where he is, face pressed into the dark wrinkle of sheets, the cave of his own self, the darkness of his own soul.

Arthur comes back a few minutes later, sits down on the edge of the bed. “Sit up.”

He drags himself up against the headboard of the bed. Arthur hands him the pills, like a child. His eyes looked bruised around the edges, and his shoulders are crumpled like wet cardboard. It dully occurs to Cobb that he must be in pain, too, but it means nothing to him. Pain, the great solipsist, forces us back into our own bodies and our heads, to be alone with ourselves, and he cannot conceive of anything beyond the black hole of his own heart. Mal Mal Mal his pulse thunders in the bone box of his skull. Gone gone gone. Gone. Gone forever.

Just like he can’t conceive of Arthur as a separate being, he can’t parse forever in any meaningful way. All he has is the selfishness of his personal pain, forcing him into the eternal now, each moment a struggle to survive to the next, to just keep surviving and dragging himself through moment after moment. He sees these moments all lined up behind each other, each clamouring to meet him, fangs drawn: Hi Cobb! Just try get through me, you poor bastard! Just try! But he can’t think of forever.

He has already seen his youth through, already faced mortality, and the idea of doing it all again, alone, is hell. He is already too old for this, already encased in the rings of history, an insect in amber. He has already lived a life.

He thinks about his children, about the kind of legacy he has gifted them with. God gives with the right hand and takes away with the left.

Cobb knocks the pills back with his coffee and stays curled over, next to Arthur, neither speaking, until he falls asleep again, sinking through layers of blessed oblivion, free from consciousness and from dreams.

He doesn’t know how long he floats like that, waking and sleeping, sliding through drugged darkness and brief, unwelcome patches of lucidity. The level in the glass of water next to him rises and falls, and he has brief diachronic patches of memory confused with reality confused with fragments of dreams sentences Arthur forces from him the light waxing and waning through the slit in the curtains the bathroom where he avoids the mirror the faces of his children Mal with her rib-bones painted all white smiling from an open window

her shoe hitting the ground with a crack

He’s reminded of stories he’s heard about freezing to death: unbearable pain turning to numbness and sleep. He covers himself with snow, drugs himself with soporifics.

Finally Arthur’s shaking his shoulder, and he comes to real life with a sudden jolt.

“What,” he says, his throat cottony and voice thick.

“It’s been four days, Cobb,” Arthur says.

“So,” he says.

“So you can’t keep doing this. It’s time to wake up.”

Time to wake up, he thinks. Time to wake up.

Arthur pulls the curtains. It’s still snowing outside, and the sky is that cloudy greyish-white that obscures all real light. He stands, a black silhouette against the white like the froth of waves. A cigarette trails soft dove whirls behind him. Cobb closes his eyes against the sudden light, pushes his face back into the pillow. The bed’s begun to smell of him, the stuffy smell of sickness. That smell the bedroom gets when nobody’s left for too long. Arthur turns around, leaning against the windowsill, cigarette hanging from his lower lip.

“Can I have one,” Cobb says, just for something, and Arthur passes him the pack. He watches Cobb while trying to look like he’s not, till the cigarette’s burned down to the butt, and then he crushes it carefully into the ashtray and says, “Does anyone know where you are?”

“Miles.”

Arthur frowns, but seems to accept this, and says, “And the police are looking for you.”

“Why are you asking me this?” Cobb says. Who gives a fuck if the police are looking for him. His wife is dead and he’ll probably never see his children again. He’ll never go home again. His home is gone.

“Because you’re a fugitive now. And I just want to know what’s going on,” Arthur says. “Go have a shower. Get dressed. You’ll feel better.”

Which is impossible, of course, because he’ll never feel better – he doesn’t see how anyone could ever claw their way out of this suffocating darkness, how he’s supposed to feel anything but this. Maybe this is as close as he can get to understanding forever. In limbo, forever had ceased to matter in the floating timelessness of nothing, had returned to its original conception as pure abstraction, but now every moment is a small prefigure of eternity, the relentlessness of the present sharply felt. The water beats down on his face, and all he can think is how he just wants to go back to sleep, surrender himself to the ersatz death.

He doesn’t even know when her funeral is. His knees give out beneath him and he sits in the shower, curled into himself, the water beating down endlessly, beating him into the ground, and wonders how he can keep living.

Outside the snow falls silently on all the living and the dead.

Time to wake up.

 

*

 

_Nairobi, May 2009_

 

“The Englishman called him fato profugus – fate’s fugitive.”

\-- Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

 

The sky above him is a flat pale spread of white-and-grey cloud through which the sun leaks but cannot penetrate, like muslin spread over a lamp. Nairobi is grey cubes and dirty thoroughfares, a city that does not breathe. It’s in a constant state of contraction rather. Shadows abound. Litter tussles in the gutters and thousands of anonymous men and women, some in bright dashikis, but most in sober grey western suits, push past him. He walks down the street, having finished the job. Anonymous windows reflect other windows. Flat greys and blacks, chewing gum stuck to the soles of his boots, light but no sun, cloud but no shade. Nairobi is industrial, ugly, dull. He is anywhere.

In his silent hotel room, he washes his face with slow, torpid movements. It is his second time in Africa, and he had not supposed it would be so cold. There is no satisfaction from the completion of the job. He rests his forehead against the cold flat mirror. He tries not to remember when he did this work for the love of it. When this job was inextricable from love. He crushes his eyes closed, breathing, focusing on the shushing whisper of breath in the echo-chamber of his skull.

Outside it’s getting dark.

He paces the hotel room, sitting to read, staring at himself in the mirror, turning lights on and off. He has a flight tomorrow. He can’t sleep. He hasn’t slept in months. He watches CNN until he feels he will go crazy if he stays here any longer, until the images on the screen slide and dissolve and his limbs itch and his head hurts. Winding a scarf around his neck, shrugging on his coat, he turns out the lights and leaves the room in darkness, with the refracting geometry of headlights sliding across the ceiling. Walking down the corridor, with its ugly impersonal wallpaper and insipid paintings, he feels despair and the silence of the long, bright passage ahead of him, physical weight. He used to think that you could get used to anything, given time, but the weight still crushes his ribs and tears his heart whenever it descends upon him. It is not a solid weight, but liquid: water in his lungs. He feels like he needs to be taught how to breathe once more; it amazes him that it once came so easily.

He directs the cab to a bar Arthur told him about. Inside it’s all polished wood, glittering chrome and half-light, businessmen and a cool quietness, like an airport lounge. Perfectly anonymous. He orders a drink and stares into its amber depths, wonders if there’s any way out of this, for the thousandth time. If he learned anything six months ago, it’s that there is no such thing. Only a network of dead ends, concentric circles curling in upon themselves. He’s too old for all of this. The smoothness of his body, its supple vigour, is still raw and foreign to him. He sits, staring into his drink, and wants to be anywhere else, but there’s nowhere for him left. He is in exile.

He thinks about his children.

He starts when a hand rests on his shoulder, and turns. Eames is looking down at him, smiling faintly, the curled undertones of mockery ever-present.

“Cobb,” Eames says. “Another drink?”

“Eames? How did you know I was here?”

Eames raises an eyebrow, the cat’s smile still in place, and says, “Nice to see you too. I’ll take that as an affirmative.”

The bartender greets him by a name which isn’t Eames. He slides into the seat next to Cobb, unwinding the scarf from around his neck, shrugging out of his coat. He taps the counter with his nails and swallows nearly half his drink when it arrives.

“How did you know I was here?”

“Arthur recommended this bar, didn’t he?”

“… Yes. Do you share bar recommendations now? This doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you two would bond over.”

“Let’s just say our social circles intersect, then,” Eames says magnanimously, all half-smiles and lazy charm. “And what brings you to Nairobi?”

“Business.”

Eames hums through his teeth, looking at him pointedly, and chews a piece of ice. It’s been over a year since Cobb last saw him, and he looks the same as ever, his hair neatly slicked back, an expensive though ill-fitting tweed jacket slung over his shoulders, a tanned taut V of flesh visible where the tieless collar of his shirt gapes open. Pantherish grace as he leans back in his chair as though in a sun-lounger, his eyes glinting in the gloom of the bar.

“I thought you would be a man in need of a drink,” he says, conciliatory, “That’s all.” The heavy weight of the unacknowledged hangs behind this statement. Cobb is simultaneously touched by the gesture – he and Eames are, after all, only work colleagues, and barely at that – and disgusted by him. He wants to punch him, to run away, to hate Eames for reminding him when all he wants to do is forget, to ease this pressure on his heart. And he wants to believe Eames, he does, but this is not the kind of man you casually trust; it’s not that he’s expecting Eames to knife him in a back alley, exactly, but he’s still dangerous.

But then, what exactly does he have to lose?

“I’ll have another,” he finally says, begrudgingly, and Eames smiles at him and signals the waiter.

“Why are you here?” he says, after knocking the burning liquid down his throat and signalling for another. Already he knows he should stop; he can feel the alcohol when he moves his head and his vision tilts not quite in sync, but it’s been so long. He’ll try anything at this point, even the most temporary of respites. The blurriness beginning inside is infinitely preferable to the sharp hurt in his chest.

“Oh, you know,” Eames says airily. “This and that.”

“You’re in Africa a lot.”

“I like Africa.”

This is typical of Eames. He’s very good at giving an answer that doesn’t actually mean anything. He stretches out, lounging in his chair, pink shirt falling forward from the faint indentation in the hollow of his collarbone, one eyebrow slightly raised, challenging him.

Cobb hasn’t got the energy for this. He wonders what Eames’ game is, and wishes Arthur was with him – Arthur’s always been the best at getting something resembling a straight answer out of Eames. He scrubs his hand over his face, rubs his eyes with index and thumb. His skin feels grainy, unwashed. “Eames, what do you want?”

“The Irish have a fantastic tradition,” Eames says, idly toying with his glass, “of sending off their loved ones by getting spectacularly pissed. It has always struck me as a resoundingly sensible thing to do. I already told you I thought you could do with a drink – on second thought, I think you could do with several.”

“But why are you here?”

Eames, now looking faintly annoyed says, “I heard you were in the bloody area, and so was I, and I had a suspicion you’d be here because I was the one to recommend the bar to bloody Arthur who tells you everything, and here we are.” He spreads his hands out in a campy gesture of surrender. “I’m not going get you drunk and make off with your wallet, yeah? We have known each other for ten years now. Does this make sense? Are you going to stop looking at me like I have silverware falling out of my pockets?”

Cobb smiles despite himself at Eames’ wide-eyed exaggerated innocence, finishing the end of his drink. He’s always enjoyed Eames’ company, found him entertaining, despite whatever Arthur had said (and personally, he thinks it’s a matter of the lady doth protesting a little too much, but he suspects Arthur would break his nose if he ever voiced that particular opinion), and he just really doesn’t want to be alone anymore. He’s done fighting. He just wants to get incredibly drunk and stop thinking, unprofessional as it may be. Eames is watching him with thought-narrowed eyes across the table, a smile breaking across his face as he senses Cobb’s resistance wear away.

“I knew you’d see sense,” Eames says, and signals the waiter over with that nearly imperceptible signal that only congenitally rich people seem to know.

Two hours later they are both extremely drunk. Eames is telling some story about how a job that Arthur’d contracted to him, that had gone wrong – “He swore blind that it was my fault, and it wasn’t, actually, and so I called him a fatuous prick that couldn’t do his research worth a damn.”

“You did that?” Cobb starts to laugh, picturing Arthur’s face, and the expression feels almost foreign on his face.

“I did.”

“And?”

“He broke my shoulder in three places before shooting me in the head. Then when we woke up I called him a fatuous prick with anger management issues and he punched me in the face.”

“And?”

“I, ah, I gave him a concussion.” Eames is probably the only person he knows who is capable of laughing fondly at the memory of putting someone in hospital. “And since then, we’ve been inseparable,” he finishes with an ironic flourish.

Cobb is laughing so hard he can barely breathe, the kind of laughter that exists on the border of hysteria. The empty glasses in front of him would take several seconds to tally up. “God, that must be why he’s so fucking uptight around you.”

“You mean he’s not like that normally?”

“Well, he’s, uh, very controlled at the best of times,” Cobb says, “But you make him about a million times worse.”

Eames sits back in his chair, looking very pleased with himself. “He’s ridiculous. He needs to loosen that waistcoat, grow a sense of humour some time.”

It occurs to Cobb that Eames wants Arthur. It’s not a new thought – Mal used to privately comment on their oddly charged conversations, the teasing innuendoes, the way that Arthur seemed to be bothered by Eames in the way that nearly nothing else bothered him. His heart constricts at the thought of Mal, and he feels guilty, hideously guilty, the taste of it hot in his mouth, because he is here and laughing with Eames, drunk in a bar like he doesn’t have anything to care about, while she is dead, dead because of him, cold and far away. He feels sick. The room contracts as the waves of horror and realisation thicken – because even now, even after six months, he is still struggling to really understand that she’s gone.

If she’s really gone. If she’ll ever really leave.

Eames is watching him, his expression thoughtful and calculating. Something like pity flickers over his face, very briefly, and for that moment Cobb wants to kill him. He finishes his drink, instead, and another round arrives as if by magic. The bar is humming low with the shushed murmurs of sophisticated patrons, red wine swirling in bulbs of blown crystal, all tastefully lowered golden light and coloured glass.

“It’s been, what, six months now?” Eames finally says, quiet.

“Yes,” Cobb says, after a silence, pushing his thumb and index finger into his eyesockets. “Six months.”

He feels guilty, that he has been laughing and joking in a bar; angry, because he can’t even do that without feeling guilty; guilty, again, because he shouldn’t want to. Guilty because he is drunk and laughing in a bar with his friend, and she will never do that again.

“Don’t you think I murdered her?” Cobb says, suddenly. “Don’t you know that’s what they’re saying?”

He’s trying to shock Eames, to make him realise that this, this mission of his, to cheer Cobb up or whatever he’s doing, it’s not going to work. He can’t help. Nobody can.

Eames for his part, just leans back, eyebrows raised, unflappable as ever. He steeples his fingers across his stomach, looking at Cobb intently, and after a moment he says, “Arthur told me she committed suicide.”

“And you believe him? That’s great. Well, you’re the only fucking one, then.”

“Of course I believe him. He’s not imaginative enough to lie.” He rests a forearm on the bar, leans over, and says, “Of all things, this is not black and white, Cobb.”

Yes, Cobb thinks. It isn’t. Because I did murder her. He thinks about the snow in Paris, noiselessly falling to the streets below. All the living and the dead.

“I truly am very sorry. I was very fond of Mal.” He’s being very tactful and careful, here, but the words are still galling; me too, Cobb wants to say, I was very fucking fond of her too, and look where that got her. He feels this sense of possession when other people express their sorrow, their regret, because how can they have the right to? This loss is his. Eames was fucking fond of her, big deal.

You never know,” Eames says, finally, “maybe it was a kind of escape for her.”

It’s a testament to Cobb’s drunkenness that he doesn’t walk out immediately. Then he thinks, fuck, how could Eames know? But he couldn’t, of course, he can’t, nobody does. Mal is just an unfortunate story to him, the smug fucking asshole. Trapped in the retroactive power of her suicide which now encompassed her life, the net drawing tighter until it became historical fact that there was no other way for her life to have ended. History, the nightmare from which he was trying to awake. The way she had tried.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Cobb says, his voice cracking.

“Christ, not a literal escape,” Eames says, “I’m not a religious nutter, as you may have already divined. But, you know, there are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio, and all that.”

“She lost the ability to distinguish dreams and reality. How the fuck does that involve heaven and earth?”

“In more ways, I am beginning to believe, than we can probably ever imagine,” Eames says, his voice earnest, maybe even honest, “In one way or another, maybe not in the way that we understand, or maybe that she intended, but – we do the impossible all the time, it’s our work. Maybe she managed it, too. You know.” His voice is grandiloquent, drunk, posturing. Maybe this is the closest Eames comes to sincerity, still with the faint patina of the actor’s constant awareness of an audience that isn’t there. “In death what dreams may come.”

Cobb wants to say, no, but she didn’t escape anything; she’s confined to the cage of the past now, eternal past-tense forever and ever amen; she is confined in the soundproofed chambers of his heart, confined in his dreams. Every day, time erodes more of her, until he is remembering his memories, echoes of echoes of a cry now trapped far away, where he can never reach her. She has ended. She is trapped.

“Who’s to say this isn’t just another level?” Eames says, almost to himself, and Cobb starts, because – this must be some kind of joke, surely –

“What?”

“Not literally,” Eames says, but his eyes narrow, and Cobb realises that he’s just given something important away, “but, at the risk of sounding like a first-year philosophy student, who’s to say that it isn’t just layer upon layer? Or circle after circle? It’s all a nightmare to wake up from, right?”

Eames, his heavy lower lip shiny with alcohol, is staring very intently at Cobb. His eyes are very dark in the twilight murk of the bar. Cobb realises that they are both very, very drunk, and that this is the closest he’s ever come to seeing anything like Eames’ real self, more genuine than the tweed and leather and self-conscious costume, the brillantined hair and sharp canines flashing. He remembers, suddenly, the discussions Eames and Mal would have in French, private and intense, and how Mal had teased him for being a jealous lover, afterwards – “Darling, Eames, he is simply not my type. He has far too many tattoos. And they are all very ugly. We are just very similar in some ways. He has a touch of the dreamer.”

Maybe this was what they were talking about. He supposes, now, he will never know.

“Are you African, Eames?” Cobb asks suddenly, because it’s been six months and this is the first time since Mal’s death that he’s been even remotely interested in another human being. He remembers the party they’d thrown when they got engaged, in Mal’s apartment in the fifth, and how Eames had brought them some incredibly expensive wine and stolen Arthur’s wallet as a party trick. Suddenly, he realises that this man is a link to the past, to his wife, a living side of her residing in him, a different refracted facet that he cannot afford to let go. And it’s the first time that anyone has discussed her with him in any important way, any real way, or treated him as though he were capable of talking about her.

Eames frowns, taken aback by this sudden show of interest, maybe realising how open he’s being. He studies his glass, swirling the amber liquid, his hands taut and tanned, and finally – making a show of trust – he says, “Putatively. Rhodesian, I suppose one would have to say, rather than Zimbabwean, but public school certainly did its best to ingrain the virtues of the Empire and erase all trace of history. And you, Mr Cobb? I rather think metropolitan Boston. And several years of expensive elocution lessons.”

He arches an eyebrow, and Cobb can’t help laughing. He feels suddenly fond of the man. For all of Eames’ slipperiness and amorality, his show of untrustworthiness, here he is. There are no coincidences. Eames was, in whatever capacity, worried about him, or at least aware of him. His situation.

His wife’s suicide is now his situation. She has become a euphemism. And now Eames is smiling that tigerish smile across the table at him, his collar fluttering over the tawny skin at his throat, and he thinks he can feel another invitation being extended. Eames has this particularly intense aura of sexuality about him, a certain libertine’s twist to his lip, as though he would happily bring the world to bed with him. He’s not certain if Eames is particularly interested in him, or if it’s just the way the man seems to operate, turning everything to innuendo and veiled tension. It dreamily occurs to him, the thought cotton-wool wrapped, muted with alcohol, that he could sleep with Eames if he wanted to (he does not), that he can sleep with whoever he chooses, because his wife exists only in the realm of dream and death, and he is released to a despairing freedom he never wanted.

It is also a trap, he supposes, a way for Eames to distract him and exert some kind of control over the situation, to keep him safe and shackled in the kind of games he plays best. Because he’s never heard Eames talk like this before, like he might be telling something close to the truth.

“Another drink?” he says, and Cobb accepts, because he no longer has the strength to resist, to stay away from what should be stayed away from, to leave Eames and his predatory heavy-lidded gaze in the bar where he belongs. He can’t bring himself to care. He is so, so tired, and despite everything Eames’ presence is a welcome distraction, and he is so sick of the guilt and the pain that he’ll try anything to get away from it. Here, so far away from home, from everything, he can almost pretend that this is happening to another person, and drink until everything is unreal and Eames the only thing from his past.

They talk, about places and people they both know, about the merits of various cities, various casualties of the job, who’s doing what. Eames tells stories that are utterly fantastical and probably only half-true at best, doing most of the talking, keeping things light and easy, a consummate professional.

It occurs to him that perhaps Eames is not as philanthropic as he’s been supposing, that maybe he, too, is searching out some kind of a link of her, to put her to rest, too. That maybe they’re looking for the same thing in each other.

Later that night, he says, staring into the depths of his glass, that terribly finite sentence, the one he can barely bring himself to say, let alone believe: “She’s gone.” Eames nods, silently, his gaze inscrutable, and Cobb just wishes that he could be disagreed with. Because how can it be true, when he still feels her everywhere, when she stalks through his dreams again and again, punishing him for his failures, his deception?

“At the risk of sounding like a bad movie,” Eames slurs, “whether or not that’s even possible is doubtful, Dom.”

They stumble from the bar at closing, Eames, being slightly less drunk, half-supporting and half-dragging Cobb with him. Nobody has been this close to Cobb since her death – not since he’d held Arthur in his drowning man’s grasp six months ago – and the heat and solidity of Eames, the sheer fact of physical presence, is intoxicating in its own right, until Cobb finds himself leaning closer and closer into the warmth, to the shining bronzed skin of Eames’ throat, hardly knowing what he’s doing. Because he’s still a link to her – and their discussions in a soft lambent language he couldn’t understand, he is a way to get her back, somehow, he has to be, there must still be a way. To tear Mal’s history from his teeth, from his throat, or maybe lose himself in Eames’s, even in the silent sordid meeting of furtive bodies in the night. To know something beyond himself and this dreadful pain and the circles drawing imperceptibly about him, keeping him in place in the forever that is no movement.

Until Eames gently pushes him away, with a small smile. The cold air of the night hits as they step outside, but does nothing to sober him up; the street’s all blurred buttons of electric night and his feet don’t work properly. “Dom,” he says. “I’m not that kind of girl. And you’re straight. And I think I can honestly say that you will very, very much regret this in the morning.”

Cobb stares at him, swaying gently, very much surprised by this development.

“I wish it would help,” Eames continues, something like a rueful smile playing about his mouth. “But you know it won’t.”

Even more unexpected, the sharp sting of humiliation. He’d definitely kill Eames now, if there were a chance in hell he could work a gun. It’s not so much the rejection as the sudden realisation – what the fuck is he doing, anyway, falling-down drunk in Nairobi, a million miles away from his kids, from any semblance of a real life, trying to sleep with his forger, who he doesn’t even want? With Mal dead, no, destroyed, destroyed by him and crushed by gravity after he and his dreams had torn any semblance of his wife’s true self away from her – what the fuck is he doing?

He just wants to feel better. But who says he has that right?

“Let’s get you home, old sport,” Eames says quietly, a consummate professional.

Three days later, he gets a phonecall.

“Dominic, old sport. Did you get out of Kenya all right?”

“Eames. Yes, I did, thank you.” What do you want seems a little rude, and would be embarrassingly obvious, so he settles for “Can I help you with anything?”

“Actually I’m calling to help you. Kobol have begun kicking up the most terrific fuss about you – they’re baying for blood. You must have gotten out just in time. I’ve no idea what you did, but I thought a quick heads-up was in order.”

“Thanks,” Cobb says, and then, “Eames…”

“Yes?”

“About… uh, about…”

“What, oh, that?” Eames’ voice manages to be both disdainful and gracious at the same time. “Christ, I shouldn’t worry about that. I’m surprised you even remember. And anyway, you couldn’t handle me in the sack.”

“What?”

“My love to Arthur. Take care of yourself, yeah?” Eames says, and hangs up.

*

_Paris, October 2010  
_

“Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argus or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death? They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass?”

\-- James Joyce, Ulysses

 

He needs a new architect, and he goes to Miles, because he can’t think of anyone else.

Ever since meeting Saito, his mind’s been aflame. It’s all real now – he finally has a way to get back home, after nearly two years of wandering and taking jobs for the sake of jobs, running away from himself. Ulysses, tossed upon the storm, has spotted a way out from the hurricane. He knows he can do this – he has to, he’ll risk anything for it. This is his last hope. If this fails, he has nothing.

But he needs a new architect, and he’s pretty fucking doubtful about the one Miles is recommending him. Arthur had been hesitant enough to get on board (and he hasn’t broken the news yet that he’ll have to get Eames in on the job, too), and bringing a rookie into the situation’s just going to make him even angrier.

“I don’t see why you can’t do this yourself,” he’d said pointedly, in the taxi from Charles de Gaulle. But Cobb doesn’t care any more, let Arthur get as mad as he fucking wanted, because they were going to do this job with or without him. The cut in itself should be enticement enough for him, but Cobb’s entire life is riding on this and he needs it.

When Miles introduces them, the first thing he thinks is how damn young she is. She’s all wide dark eyes, the conservative clothes of a kid trying to play adult, a habit of biting her bottom lip she can’t quite disguise. She reminds him of Arthur a little bit, when they first met, radiating youthful, ill-disguised intensity. The core of steel, the inherent hardness he’s always been able to recognise in others, a requisite for braving the mental traps of dreaming.

He tries not to compare her to Mal, but the effort is pointless.

He takes Ariadne on the roof, under the grey skies of autumnal Paris, and watches her prove herself. He takes her dreaming. By the end of the day, he’s certain: she’s the one. He watches her dance through the world of her own creation, bending the laws of physics, recognising the same violent delights he’d felt, they’d all felt, the bright elation of freedom beyond anything she’d ever known illuminating her face. With her cheeks flushed and her lips parted, bringing glass and gilding forth from nothing, lit up with the power of a god, she’s beautiful. Beautiful in her enthusiasm and youth – she’s so young, without any of the harsh control of Arthur or the mocking distance of Eames, without any of the defence mechanisms she’ll eventually have to erect. She is playing with tigers, and has not yet spotted their claws. There’s an intense sadness, watching her playing, knowing that very soon this will all be gone. He wishes she weren’t starting on such a dangerous job. The thought surprises him.

They stand beneath white overcast skies, her cheeks pink with the cold. It’s been threatening snow the last few days. Cobb closes his eyes, thinks round and round we go.

He’s attracted to her, and wishes he weren’t.

She’s charming and pretty and he thinks, maybe, this could be easy, if Mal would only stop hunting her prey. If he could find his way out of these ever-smaller circles, like ripples in a pond, which glimmer and dissolve before you can really map them. He keeps the circular maze Ariadne drew, crumpled tight in his coat pocket. Round and round. He can’t believe he was ever naïve enough to think the past was ever truly past. He can’t believe he might be naïve enough to think this girl might yet hold the thread.

Past historic. Future perfect. He has already dreamed his future once; he already knows how this will end. There is no such thing as a fugitive of fate.

They sit together, late at night, Ariadne with her fingers wrapped around a steaming mug of tea and shadows under her eyes. She looks so young, and he hears her sharp intake of breath when he leans over her to show her some blueprints. The thunder of her heart. They are all alone in the warehouse, surrounded by shadows and cables and paper. The nape of her neck glows pale beneath him. A neck like any, every woman’s. All the marching echoes of the ghosts we have been and will be. If he closes his eyes and squints.

He thinks about how he’s lying to everyone.

Why can’t you build, she says, and he closes his eyes, thinks about beaches, sandcastles and straight square skylines. Arthur’s apartment in Paris, his drawn face, his eyes red and sore. A bar in Nairobi, with Eames gleaming in front of him. He thinks about how nothing since Mal (and now she’s shorthand – whenever anyone says Mal, they mean Mal’s suicide) has been easy. Nothing has not hurt him. He used to think that death had forced Mal into history forever; now he realises that he is the one trapped in there, he’s the one caught in its revolving doors, going round and round. Transfigured, she is freed, and he is left behind, uselessly beating his fists against the glass.

“I’m older,” he says, so quietly she almost can’t hear, “than you can ever know.”

He can’t see Ariadne except in the context of a past she can never know, that’s forever closed off to her, that holds him at the throat like a lover. She’s so young. He will never see her for who she truly is. She deserves better.

Something bright outside catches his eye, briefly, and he realises it’s begun to snow.

Nothing will ever be easy again. The past is the past, and he can’t keep trying to save Mal after she’s already died. He’s trapped in the centre of the maze, with the snow settling soft around him, obscuring everything.

He knows this, and yet he kisses her anyway.

  



End file.
